Most SEO work on a new site is cheap to do at launch and expensive to retrofit. This is the order I work through before and immediately after a site goes live.
Before launch
1. URL structure
Decide this first, because changing it later means redirects and lost ranking.
- Lowercase, hyphen-separated, descriptive: /services/web-development
- No dates in blog URLs unless the content is genuinely time-bound — dated URLs look stale forever
- No IDs where a word would do
- Shallow. /blog/post-name beats /content/articles/2026/category/post-name
2. One canonical domain
Pick www or non-www and redirect the other. Force HTTPS. Serving the same page on four URL variants splits your signals four ways.
3. Unique title and meta description per page
- Title: 50 to 60 characters, most important words first
- Description: 120 to 160 characters, written to earn a click rather than to please an algorithm
- Never duplicate either across pages
4. One H1 per page, and a real heading hierarchy
The H1 should be visible and describe the page. Do not hide it and style an H2 to look like a heading — a surprisingly common template pattern. Section titles are H2, subsections H3, and card titles inside a section are H3, not H2.
5. Alt text that describes the image
Describe what the image shows. Purely decorative images should have an empty alt and be hidden from assistive tech — or better, be CSS backgrounds so they are not images in the markup at all.
alt="image" and alt="error" are worse than nothing, because they pass automated checks while telling users and search engines exactly zero.
Technical setup
6. robots.txt
Must be reachable at /robots.txt. In Next.js that means the public folder — the project root does not work and fails silently.
7. XML sitemap
Generate it from your content rather than maintaining it by hand, and reference it from robots.txt.
8. Structured data
At minimum: Organization or Person, WebSite, and BreadcrumbList. Add Article on posts, Product on products, FAQPage where you genuinely have questions and answers. Validate it before launch.
9. Open Graph and Twitter cards
Including an image. Without these, every share of your site looks broken, which quietly costs you traffic that never appears in any report.
10. Performance
Compress images, lazy-load below-the-fold content, set image dimensions to prevent layout shift, and confirm compression is active. Aim for green Core Web Vitals before launch rather than after.
Content structure
11. Every piece of content needs its own URL
This one is worth stating plainly because it is the most damaging mistake I see: content inside modals, tabs opened by JavaScript, or accordions that unmount their contents cannot be indexed or shared. If it matters, give it a URL.
12. Internal linking
Every page should be reachable from at least one other page. Link related content to each other. Orphan pages that only exist in the sitemap rank poorly.
13. Enough content to say something
There is no magic word count, despite what you will read. There is a threshold below which a page has not answered the question it promised, and that is what matters.
After launch, on day one
- Verify the site in Google Search Console
- Submit your sitemap there
- Request indexing for your most important pages
- Set up Bing Webmaster Tools as well — it takes five minutes and feeds other engines
- Install analytics and confirm it is actually recording
- Crawl your own site with a crawler to find broken links and missing metadata
In the first month
- Check Search Console coverage for pages that failed to index, and why
- Watch which queries you appear for — they are rarely the ones you expected, and that is useful information
- Fix any crawl errors
- Publish content consistently rather than in one burst
- Get your first few backlinks: directories that matter in your industry, your own profiles, any client or partner willing to link
What to ignore early
- Keyword density. This has not been a real factor for many years.
- The meta keywords tag. Google has ignored it since 2009.
- Buying backlinks. The risk is real and the benefit is temporary.
- Chasing a perfect performance score.
- Publishing large volumes of thin content. Google explicitly penalises scaled low-value content, so twenty shallow posts can actively hurt you where six good ones would have helped.
The realistic timeline
A new domain takes three to six months to gain traction, sometimes longer. Nothing on this list changes that. What it does change is whether the traffic finds anything worth ranking when it eventually arrives.